


Forty Down, Two Across

by Callie



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-25
Updated: 2010-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:07:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie/pseuds/Callie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forty is a lonely birthday to spend in another galaxy, but old friends make it better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forty Down, Two Across

**Author's Note:**

> Just a silly piece of Sam-centric fluff set sometime in SGA season four.

  Sam was used to having her birthday overlooked. Just four days after Christmas, it had always been lumped in with holiday celebrations when she was young.  Her mother had tried to separate the two a little when she was alive, but when she was gone her father was usually away at work those days after Christmas, and it was one of the multiple things that had only made her more resentful of him. 

    And as everyone knows, the older you get, the less your birthday really means.

    This, though, was her fortieth birthday. Some kind of milestone, possibly marking the halfway point in her life. And what was she doing? Sitting in her office on a base in another galaxy, filling out requisitions. Oh, she wasn't complaining about being here. She could think of half a dozen people who would kill for this assignment, and she was grateful to be here. The things she had seen out here up to this point--she wouldn't trade them for anything.  She had the best possible people working for her, and even if her initial welcome had been frosty from some corners and horribly awkward from others, she was at a point where she felt like she had a good working relationship with the men and women under her command.

    But it was lonely at the top.

    She wondered if this was how General Hammond had felt, watching SG-1 go on mission after mission and only venturing offworld once in a blue moon.  The Atlantis teams were top-notch, wonderful people, but she was their boss; so aside from the occasional breakfast or cup of coffee, or in John's case, their regular chats on the balcony outside her office, she didn't socialize with her people very much.  Her command style was more like Hammond than Landry, a little more distant. She had plenty of smart people there to get the job done, and the best thing to do was to leave them alone and let them do their jobs. Even _McKay_. And it seemed to be working pretty well, even if it meant she got very few chances to go offworld these days.

    That made for a lonely fortieth, though. Oh, it hadn't gone by _entirely _unnoticed. Someone (probably Keller, since she had the most reason to poke around in the records) had let it slip what day it was, and while no one really said anything, little things had appeared on her desk throughout the day.  A bottle of Athosian ale which could only have come from Teyla, the small wooden plaque carved with Earth's point of origin had to be from Ronon, and the sweet but inedible birthday cake could have only come from the one woman on the base who was a worse cook than she was--Keller. Zelenka had sent her an e-card made from a photo of one of his pigeons. McKay had compiled some of his more "groundbreaking" theories onto a flash drive for her, and boy was she was just _dying _to read those. (Okay, maybe she was... a little. It had been a long time since she'd been able to talk shop with anyone, since she'd figured out that McKay worked best if she left him alone and let him flail for a while.) John had given her a fruit basket very much like the one he'd given her when she arrived.

    Weirdly enough, she hadn't heard a peep from any of her former teammates. Not that they had ever made a big deal out of birthdays--well, except Vala, who loved any excuse for a party--but _still_.  She felt a little like a pouty five year old when it was close to the end of the day and there hadn't been so much as a peep from the Milky Way. Not even a "Hi, how's things?" piggybacked onto the daily SGC status reports.

    "M'am?" It was Chuck in her doorway, holding a box.  "This came for you when the latest batch of supplies were offloaded. It wasn't listed on the manifest, but it came with a directive  from Washington not to let you have it until today."  Chuck looked a little like he thought she was going to scold him for not telling her sooner, so she tried not to look too stern.

    "Thanks, Chuck. You can put it on the desk."  Sam tried to act like she wasn't even remotely curious about what was in that box, and continued typing up the requisitions. God, they went through ridiculous amounts of bottled water and fruit cups on this base. The plastic they must be generating... she didn't even want to think about the environmental impact they were having on this planet.

    She waited until Chuck was well back to the control room before closing the laptop and opening the box. If it was from Washington, then there was absolutely no telling what was inside and this was one present she'd prefer not to be witnessed opening. There were five small wrapped packages inside, along with the unmistakable scent of coffee.

    "Oh, God bless you, Daniel Jackson," Sam said as she tore the wrapping off what turned out to be a bag of very expensive, perfectly roasted coffee beans--much, _much_ better than what they got in SGC requisitions.  She grinned when she saw the label and held the package up to her nose, breathing deeply.

    They had taken Teal'c to this coffee shop off base once a few years ago. General O'Neill had gone with them, though he had complained the whole time that the coffee in the mess was just as good as that "fancy crap" and he didn't see why they had to go off base just for a cup of joe.  That had earned him a lecture from Daniel on the politics of fair trade coffee and a lecture from Sam on the chemistry behind various methods of bean roasting, and got them a "for cryin out loud" in return. 

    "Does not the coffee consumed at the SGC contain caffeine, Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c had asked.  "It would seem that among the Tau'ri, this substance is prized for its alertness-giving properties, and is thus the primary reason humans consume this beverage."

    "That is so not the point," Sam and Daniel had answered in unison, while General O'Neill had just rolled his eyes and dumped sugar in his cup.  That had been one of her favorite off-duty afternoons, Sam remembered fondly.  She and Daniel had spent the rest of the afternoon educating Teal'c on the finer points of coffee consumption while the general just groaned.

    The next package (wrapped in paper that was identical to the paper Daniel's coffee had been wrapped in, which did not escape Sam's notice) contained two small but very sparkly hair clips.  There was no tag, but they could only be from Vala.

    She and Vala hadn't often done "girly things", because... well, because while Sam secretly enjoyed a pedicure as much as the next woman, she just didn't have time to fool with it most of the time.  But there was that one particular weekend that Vala had been going particularly stir-crazy cooped up on the base, and Sam had felt so bad for her that she dragged her out for Starbucks, a pedicure, and shopping. Vala was born to shop, and since she was on the Air Force payroll but had nowhere to spend her check, she'd had a grand time.  Sam had mostly followed her around and made sure that she actually _paid_ for everything. Especially at Victoria's Secret, where Vala had conveniently forgotten to take the clothes off after she'd tried them on.

    "These would look pretty on you," Vala had said in one store. She was examining hair accessories--little beaded ponytail holders, sparkly clips, jeweled hairpins. "Don't you think?"

    Sam had just frowned. "Eh..." she said, noncommitally.  "Not really my thing."

    "Oh, come on," Vala urged. "Look." She took two of the smaller sparkly clips, twisted up little bits of hair at Sam's temples and clipped them in.  "See? Isn't that lovely?"

    "I look like I'm in kindergarten," Sam said, though part of her thought that if they were in a different way, or her hair was a little longer, then maybe... no. Too sparkly. She never had anywhere to wear anything like that anyway.

    "Suit yourself," said Vala, who had ended up buying three pairs of sparkly clips and two pairs of jeweled hair sticks in addition to a tiny tiara. Vala had no problems wearing sparkly things with her uniform, and since she was technically an independent contractor, she had a little more leeway in her attire. Sam remembered feeling a little envious of the way Vala just did what she wanted--even if it wasn't Sam's style, she could appreciate it.

    Sam laid the hair clips aside and opened the next two packages. One was a thick, honey-colored candle embedded with various Jaffa designs; obviously from Teal'c. The paper bag of macaroons was from Cam. _In case you're stuck on infirmary food out there_, the note read, and that made her laugh out loud. She hated them, and he knew it, but it was just a thing they did, a kind of in-joke between them, and it was the thought behind it that mattered.  Maybe she could share them with Rodney. That man would eat anything. Macaroons didn't have any citrus ingredients, did they?

    At the very bottom of the box, very messily wrapped, was a book of crossword puzzles.  A battered green post-it note was stuck to the front cover.

  
\--_Take a break, Carter._

  
    "Sir, do you ever read anything besides the sports section?"

    He was sitting in her lab with the sports section, boots propped up on the table dangerously near her laptop, muttering about baseball or football or some kind of ball. Sam wasn't really paying attention.  The rest of the paper was scattered all over her table and the floor as if it was his living room in here and not her lab. "Nope," he said arily. "Waste of time, all of it."

    "Waste of time, sir?"

    "Yep," he'd said. "Every damn bit of it, 'cept for sports. Anything those yahoos in Washington get up to that directly affects us, we'll hear about it before it hits the paper, if it does at all, and after you've gone through the gate a coupla times who cares about all that other crap?"  He turned the page, shaking the paper to make the pages lie flat.  "This here, Carter--this is the _real _news."

    Sam just shook her head and dragged the laptop a safe distance away from both his boots and her coffee cup. She had a simulation going, and if he messed it up it would be a week's worth of work to redo, and she really did not feel like going over all that again.

    "Course," he added, turning the page, "I do enjoy a good crossword puzzle from time to time."

    "You do." It was meant to be a question, but it came out more like an expression of disbelief.  "Crosswords? Seriously?"

    "You bet."  He closed the sports section, folded it, and slapped it down on the table.  "Nothin' better to get the old noggin goin' in the morning than a good old crossword. Right out of the New York Times, even.  Mmm... _words_."

    Now she knew he was having her on, and she managed not to roll her eyes at him through some sheer stroke of luck. "Oh yeah, right, sure you do, sir," she said. "Here..."  She walked around the table and swept up the papers on the floor, shaking through them until she found what she wanted: the crossword. A couple quick flicks of the wrist later and she'd torn it out of the paper.  "Bet you can't finish that one."

    He leaned over and eyed the puzzle on her desk. "I can _so_ do this," he said, shifting his boots on the table. "Piece of cake."

    "Want to make that a bet, sir?"

    He didn't move except to flick his eyes from the puzzle to her.  "Maybe," he allowed.  "What's the stakes?"

    Sam leaned her elbows on the table, and the scattering of newspapers slid a little beneath her arms. "If you don't finish that puzzle in three days, then you have to take us out for a beer. Us being me, Daniel, and Teal'c," she amended quickly.

    She tried not to laugh as he made an attempt at Teal'c's little eyebrow thing, which on him came out altogether different.  "And if--no, _when_ I finish it? You're buying?"

    "Okay," she agreed.  "You finish that, and I'm buying."

    He grinned and picked up the paper. "'The atomic weight of boron'," he read, then glanced around her lab as if expecting a periodic table to magically appear stuck to the two inches of wall space that weren't taken up with racks of computers.

    "No cheating, sir," she warned. "That means no asking Daniel, either."

    He'd jumped up from his chair and bolted out the door with puzzle in hand at the same time Sam had grabbed the phone and dialed Daniel's extension, though she almost didn't manage her explanation for laughing about it.

    She peeled off the post-it note, stuck it to her desk, and flipped through the book. It seemed fairly easy enough, and she was about to set it aside for later when she noticed one of the pages was turned down.  A few letters were penciled in, though the word they spelled didn't fill up the boxes allotted.

_**Across**  
2\. National Treasure.  
_  
_Carter_, he'd written.


End file.
